Three years after a New Jersey resident filed a discrimination suit against Web-based matchmaking service eHarmony.com, the online dating portal has settled out of court and agreed to offer same-sex matchmaking services to members.Garden State resident Eric McKinley filed suit against the California-based company in 2005. As part of the settlement, eHarmony agrees to provide new services for members identifying themselves as "male seeking a male" or "female seeking a female" by March 2009.
eHarmony did reserve the right to provide a disclaimer -- that its compatibility-based matching system was developed solely on the basis of researched focused on married heterosexual couples.
"I applaud the decision of eHarmony to settle this case and extend its matching services to those seeking same-sex relationships," New Jersey Division on Civil Rights director J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo said in a statement Wednesday.
eHarmony was one of a few Web-based dating holdouts that had not ventured into the world of offering same-sex dating services. Last year Time magazine named eHarmony one of the five websites to avoid, noting, among other things, its discrimination against gay people.
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